autechre interview on tiny mixtapez

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/autechre

While it is clear that you are using software languages, are specifically still using Max/MSP and Kyma? Or have you gone on to other languages, such as C-Sound?

More Max really. Kyma’s cool, but we haven’t touched upon it much this time, mainly because we wanted to keep that snapshot approach I’ve been mentioning. We only have one Kyma device, so we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thinly in that department. We wanted to create duplicates both in his studio and my studio, so if ever I had an idea I could take a snapshot, forward it to Sean, and he’d have a duplicate to recall. He’d have my sound straight away. With Kyma, it wouldn’t have been as simple because we’d only have one device. So we kept it to devices we had more than two of. It was mostly Max/MSP, Logic, and some duplicate outboard hardware that we have.

It sounds like your compositional style takes a MIDI-like approach in this regard. Is there still relevance to MIDI, especially in your work?

Yeah, MIDI’s still relevant. It’s such a lightweight medium, in terms of data, so it’s easy to transfer information. It seems like Ableton Live! doesn’t cover the full scope of MIDI, whereas Logic would. Max/MSP you can develop the setup yourself, so there’s no limit to what you can do there. We managed to keep it amongst Logic and Max.

I think a lot of new people, they use internal systems where MIDI’s irrelevant. But with MIDI, it’s a digital interface, meaning more than one component is alive at any one time. With us, that is considered typical of our methods, so MIDI is essential, more or less.